Wireless communication devices have evolved greatly over the past few years. A wide variety of content such as stock quotes, news, weather, video/audio, and the like can now be provided to a wireless communication device. To provide such diverse content in an efficient manner, two types of wireless information communication modes can be used. The first wireless information communication mode is unicast. Unicast communication sends a copy of the requested information to each of the requesting devices. Unicast is a point-to-point communication method and is useful when not transmitting to large numbers of receiving devices.
The second wireless information communication mode is broadcast/multicast services or BCMCS. The Third Generation Partnership Project 2 or 3GPP2 standards define BCMCS as a service intended to provide a flexible and efficient mechanism to send common (the same) information to multiple users using the most efficient use of air interface and network resources. Retransmission and acknowledgment in BCMCS are not required, since the type of transmission is “one way” and “one to many”. Users (wireless communication devices) can subscribe for BCMCS. For example, a BCMCS subscription is normally associated with the program (e.g. CNN, Disney Channel, Sports Channel). In another embodiment, a BCMCS subscription is also associated with media related services such as pay-per-view. By selecting the program, the user selects the type of content he or she wishes to receive. However the type of information transmitted could be any type of data, e.g. text, multimedia (e.g. voice), real-time, and non-real-time streaming media.
BCMCS programs may be transmitted to all or selected regions of the wireless communications network. These regions constitute the transmission territory. Operationally, the transmission territory for each BCMCS program can be independently defined.
Although unicast and broadcasting/multicasting modes are useful methods for transmitting information, an efficient way to optimize these unicast and broadcast/multicast communication modes in a wireless communications system does not exist. Current standards do not define how broadcast/multicast services should be delivered to wireless communication devices.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.